


my body's not my own these days [my hands move without me]

by seekingsquake



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Dissociative Identity Disorder, Gen, Implied/Referenced Attempted Suicide, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-26
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-08-27 02:09:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8383906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: All parts of Bruce need to learn to work together to keep him safe, otherwise he's only going to keep falling apart.





	

“Yo, Bruce! C’mere and watch this thing!” Tony’s voice rings out over the lab, loud and amused. Bruce is at a table near the back of the room and off to the side a little, facing out the window. They haven’t spoken much today, both caught up in their own projects, but Tony’s gearing down for dinner and has been watching funny videos on YouTube on and off for the last hour or so. He turns when Bruce doesn’t respond to him, and he looks over to see that Bruce hasn’t even moved. 

“Bruce?” Tony moves across the room and leans his hip against Bruce’s table. “You in there, Buddy?”

Bruce’s body sort of twitches, and then Bruce looks up. He smiles, but his eyes look a little vacant, a little disoriented. “Yeah, what’s up?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, just zoned out there for a second. What’s up?”

Tony just looks at him for a second, critical and concerned and affectionate all at once. Finally he says, “Come look at this thing I found. It’s funny!” and Bruce follows him back across the lab, and they watch the video. Bruce laughs but is a little subdued, but he’s a generally sort of subdued kind of guy, so Tony doesn’t comment.

 

The name thing is kind of... Well, it’s odd. It was the media that first called Hulk Hulk; Hulk adopted it for himself because it’s what other people called him. Bruce still calls him The Other Guy. But the weird part of it all is when people call  _ him  _ Hulk, as if he and Hulk are the same person, as if they’re interchangeable, as if one equals the other. Neither of them think this is true; Hulk may have been born from Bruce, but they’re not the same.

Necklaces made out of lost shark teeth are not the shark.

Windchimes made of animal bones are not animals.

Hulk is not Bruce; this is something they both know (Bruce is not always convinced that he is not Hulk, but he’s never consciously put words to the fact that Hulk is only Hulk even though Bruce may somehow be both).

 

The first time he heard it, they called it Multiple Personality Disorder. He was a kid. His mother was dead, his father was in prison, and a doctor told his aunt that it came from severe childhood trauma. She had cried so hard she started hiccuping, and she’d hugged him so tightly he thought his chest would burst from the pressure. “I’m so sorry,” she’d whispered into his hair. “I’m so sorry.”

These days they call it Dissociative Identity Disorder. It sounds less scary like that, and if he’d heard it like that as a kid maybe he wouldn’t have hated it so much. He remembers sitting in his bedroom in his aunt’s home and saying to himself, over and over, “There’s only me in here. I’m the only one here.” And it was true. There was no one else. Except...

Sometimes he would fall asleep and dream about his father, and when he woke up he’d be eating dinner at the table with his aunt the next day. His body was apparently up and about, going to school and doing homework. Someone inside of him lived his life while he... Slept. Hid. “I’m the only one here.” He didn’t like that his body would move without him, didn’t like that he couldn’t remember how he got to where he was. Didn’t like that nobody noticed that it wasn’t him anymore.

 

Hulk throws a car through a building that’s half way falling down anyway at the end of a battle. “Bruce, Buddy, c’mon now,” Tony’s voice filters out through his helmet.

“NOT BRUCE!” Hulk shouts, and everybody in the vicinity winces at the volume.

“Okay, okay! Not Bruce! Got it!” 

 

Sometimes, especially more recently, he’s in charge of who’s in charge. If they need to go into a fight with a giant alien, Bruce can say, “Okay, this is not the job for me.” 

When it’s like that, it feels like he moves from the driver’s seat into the back seat of a car; he can see out the window and maybe say something to influence the direction or destination, but he’s not driving anymore. He can nap if he wants to. If the driver is reckless, he’ll feel anxious, but if the driver is careful he’s fine.

In the beginning it was never like that. In the beginning it felt like he was driving the car with no cares in the world, and all of a sudden a stranger had forcibly removed him from behind the wheel and stuffed him into the trunk, then drove off at top speeds. It felt like no matter how much he screamed or kicked at the tail lights, he was never going to see daylight again.

When he was a kid, it felt like an alien had taken up residence inside him when he wasn’t paying attention.

Bruce doesn’t know if the alien and the carjacker are the same. Bruce is pretty sure that the only reason The Other Guy doesn’t steal the car so much anymore is because sometimes Bruce says, “Hey, why don’t you drive?”

The thing is though, that sometimes he still catches the alien moving his hands. 

He says, “It’s only me in here,” on tough days, because even though Hulk is not Bruce, Bruce might be The Other Guy. The alien doesn’t have a name, and doesn’t steal the car, and therefore is nothing. Right? “It’s only me in here. It’s only me.”

 

The first time Bruce meets Wanda, she gets right up in his head. She carjacks Hulk, and Hulk carjacks him, and by the time he gets out of the trunk everything is broken around him. 

 

“Bruce, are you in there?” his aunt calls from outside the bedroom door, and Bruce is crying because the alien has done something to his body that he couldn’t stop and didn’t want. There are bloody scissors on his desk, and sheets wrapped around his wrists to try to stop the bleeding, and when his aunt comes into the room she gasps.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce sobs, inconsolable, as his aunt bundles him into the car and drives him to the hospital. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that, I don’t know why--”

He doesn’t like to be touched, because when people touch him they’re generally trying to control or manipulate him in some way. He kind of let his guard down around the team though ( _ stupid stupid stupid _ ) and Natasha pushes him and--

He’s in the trunk, and for once in his life he’s screaming so loudly that The Other Guy can hear him from back there, and Hulk’s heart is breaking because neither of them chose this. Neither of them  _ want  _ Bruce shaking and screaming in the trunk. But if Hulk doesn’t drive right now a lot of people are going to die. So Hulk drives, and Bruce screams from the trunk of the car, and when Hulk hears  _ runrunrungodplease _ he runs. He drives the car and he steers the plane, and if it was up to him and Bruce they’d disappear forever and never be found again.

Hulk tells Bruce  _ It’s only me in here _ , but there’s that damn fucking alien.

 

Bruce shows up at the compound, uncertain of how he got there and uncertain of how he will be received. Wanda answers the door, and they both flinch, and then she allows him enough room to step inside without having to brush by her. Natasha is right there, and Bruce flinches again, and when she reaches out to hug the body it’s the alien that puts the hand on her arm to stop her. 

“Please,” he hears his voice say, “don’t.” They’re his thoughts, but if it were up to him he wouldn’t have said anything to her at all.

The thing, though, is that he hasn’t really been in charge of anything at all since Wanda...

_ Don’t think about it. _

Between The Other Guy and the alien, Bruce has been only back seat driving for months now. But, you know. At least he’s out of the trunk.

 

He loses track of time in the lab, isn’t really sure who’s moving the hands or who’s driving the car, and something breaks. The hands are bloody, and Tony startles at the sound of shattering glass, and it’s Bruce and only Bruce that breaks out into tears.

“Fuck!” he nearly screams. “Fuck!”

Tony can’t reach for him because of the radiation in his blood, but he raises his voice loud over Bruce’s and says, “Calm the fuck down and tell me what to do!”

“Give me my body back,” Bruce begs. “Let me belong to myself again. I can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t--”

Tony just stares.

 

When Bruce wakes up in the morning, the first thing he does is go into a deep meditative state.  _ You’re on call, okay?  _ he says to The Other Guy, and Hulk rumbles his agreement. He likes being on call. He watches from the back seat, and when he sees and emergency coming he can jump forward and smash stuff. Then Bruce turns to the alien.  _ I’m driving today. _

_ Gonna let anyone hurt you?  _ the alien asks.

_ No. _

_ Guess you’re in charge, then. _

_ Good. _

Later in the day, Bruce is sitting in the main room with a book and a cup of tea. Natasha comes in, and as she walks behind the couch to get into the kitchen she drops her hand onto Bruce’s shoulder. Bruce watches his own hand twitch.  _ Trust me _ , he thinks.

“Hey Nat? I’d really appreciate it if you asked before you touched me.”

His hand stills, and the alien huffs. Natasha’s hand lifts off his shoulder. “No problem, Bruce.”

 

Bruce is ten years old. He’s lived with aunt for almost a year now, and every morning he comes down the stairs for breakfast she watches his eyes very closely. “Good morning,” she says quietly.

He looks at her solemnly for a moment, and his eyes are a little emptier than they usually are when he’s fully with her. Not quite Bruce, then.

“Is Bruce still sleeping?” she asks softly before getting down a bowl and a box of Corn Pops. If she gives this Bruce Cocoa Puffs, he’ll throw a fit.

“He had bad dreams. Sometimes he thinks that eventually you’re gonna start treating him like daddy did, and he has bad dreams about it.”

She nods as she slides his breakfast across the table to him. “I would never do that to him.”

Bruce takes a bite of his cereal. Whoever is moving Bruce’s body has never told her a name, so she can’t help but to think of him as Bruce. He never takes his eyes off her. “I’ll take him away if you do,” he says, and there’s no emotion in his voice. “And I’ll take him away if he gets too scared, too.”

“I know you will,” she answers, and her eyes linger on his tiny little wrist as he moves the spoon to his lips for another bite of breakfast.

“Good.”

When she looks back at his face, his eyes are wide and confused, and his lip is trembling a little. Her Bruce is back to being himself, and it always breaks her heart to see him so upset. “Aunty Susan?”

She leans across the table and runs her fingers through his hair. “It’s okay, Sweet Boy. I love you so much. Eat your cereal, okay?”

Aunt Susan only buys Cocoa Puffs because Bruce begs her to, but he finds himself eating Corn Pops more often than not even though he doesn’t really like it.

**Author's Note:**

> So. The trunk thing is what my DID feels like. And I've had a really difficult few days staying in the drivers seat. Writing this sort of helped, so I hope Bruce still sounds like Bruce even though he's struggling with my own trunk.


End file.
